The state's Supreme Judicial Court, the oldest appellate court in the Western Hemisphere, was in session yesterday in the magnificently restored John Adams Courthouse at Government Center. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall and the six other justices peppered attorneys with questions about yet another insurance company that - no surprise here - didn't want to pay yet another claim.
But that is not our story today. Instead, our story is about the 104-year-old courthouse itself, and about the increasingly contentious - and expensive - legal battle that could add tens of millions of dollars in cost to Margie Marshall's fabulous but already pricey monument to justice.
The Boston Herald likes to mock the Adams Courthouse as "the Palace of Versailles"; those gritty tabloid guys have obviously never been to Versailles. But the Adams Courthouse, a dump in its final days as the old Suffolk County Courthouse, is once again something special.
The Great Hall, the building's most ornate feature, is notable for its ceiling frescoes, 16 figures by Spanish sculptor Domingo Mora, and a bronze statue of prominent Boston attorney Rufus Choate by Daniel Chester French, the artist who sculpted the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Famed Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's bench is still in use in courtroom number two.
All finely restored in 2005 - at a fine price. That price now stands at $150 million, up from the initial estimate of $48 million in 1992. (We know all too well how those things go.) But next door at the Suffolk County Courthouse a battle of lawyers is well underway that could add as much as $55 million to the cost. Two large boxes jammed with legal briefs tell the story.
The fight pits two of the Commonwealth's best known names in the construction business: John Fish vs. David Perini.
Fish, 50, is the Energizer Bunny chief executive of Suffolk Construction Co., the man many believe is in line to become the next go-to guy in the Boston business community. Perini, who at 70 still bikes the 190-mile Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, spent 27 years running the family construction business, huge Perini Corp. Eight years ago he became head of the state Division of Capital Asset Management, which oversees many state construction projects. Fish and Perini competed for years for business; now they are on opposite sides of a legal battle where passions are running high.
Both sides let their legal briefs speak for them.
In his lawsuit, Fish essentially says the state is trying to make Suffolk and its many subcontractors eat the cost overruns. The Suffolk lawsuit claims the state provided it with "defective and incomplete" documents that led it to underbid the job and ignore its own consultants who warned that numerous parts of the project design were "unbiddable" and "not quantifiable." It says the state has "intentionally withheld" documents and refused to negotiate on many of the project change orders.
In its reply and a countersuit, Perini's office says Suffolk has no one to blame but itself. The state says Suffolk failed to stay on schedule, used faulty construction techniques, and "systematically submitted inflated, improper, and incomplete change orders." The state says Suffolk threatened to slow down work to drive up the state's cost for temporarily leased space unless it picked up additional costs. Suffolk has already been paid $20 million for project changes, the state says.
Suffolk was the lone bidder for the project. Perini Corp., which sought the job, was disqualified in the process because of a conflict. The Division of Capital Asset Management recused itself during the selection process because of David Perini's history with the company. Suffolk, which also reconstructed the Saltonstall building, had a difficult negotiation with the state over cost overruns but settled out of court. Suffolk has since built the campus center at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Middlesex County House of Correction without problems.
The Commonwealth has turned over a half million pages of documents to Suffolk in the discovery process. Suffolk is now pursuing the e-mail trail. The SJC has found itself drawn into the scrum over its grand new home, ruling that the state did not have to turn over documents protected by attorney-client privilege.
Before it is over, Justice Marshall and her colleagues could find themselves sitting in judgment of the contractor who rebuilt their home so well - but at what cost? That would, indeed, be a tricky bit of justice, all things considered.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
